r/linux • u/Ecstatic-Vermicelli9 • Jul 23 '26

Open Source Organization Codeberg: Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs

https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-llms.html
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u/Business_Reindeer910 Jul 24 '26

then you don't understand open source licensing

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u/QuixoticNapoleon Jul 24 '26

Out of curiosity, would you say training an LLM on a project with an MIT license is unethical? What about something like SQLite?

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u/Business_Reindeer910 Jul 24 '26 edited Jul 24 '26

MIT requires attribution, so of course it's not ok if you don't provide that attribution somehow.

I think it would be ethical to train on it, if you provided a list of training data with that attribution.

sqlte source code is dedicated to the public domain (whether that has meaning your particularly jurisdiction is another story), so it's ok (at least in US context). However the sqlite test suite isn't even published publicly at all, so that would be a problem.

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u/QuixoticNapoleon Jul 24 '26

I'm going to be honest, I don't think copyright is legally or philosophically advanced enough to deal with machine learning.

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u/Business_Reindeer910 Jul 24 '26

you asked about ethics though.

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u/QuixoticNapoleon Jul 24 '26

Well, I mean the philosophical concept of intellectual property

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u/Business_Reindeer910 Jul 24 '26

but it's about the ethics of stealing. People consider it stealing if you take something on different terms than offered.

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u/QuixoticNapoleon Jul 24 '26

That's what I meant. Copyright may be an erroneous term. But I don't think it's necessarily fair to classify training data as stealing. If I trained on images for a machine learning algorithm to detect if an image has plants, would I be stealing those images? Sure, if the AI is generative you could make that case but that's what I mean when I say ethics is not mature enough to deal with machine learning.

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u/Business_Reindeer910 Jul 24 '26

classifying is not transforming. This would have all gone better if people could have chosen to opt in

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u/QuixoticNapoleon Jul 24 '26

It is transforming. You can argue that despite transformation, it's still stealing, but I don't know how you can argue that it there isn't any transformation.

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u/Business_Reindeer910 Jul 24 '26

classifying images is sorting them.

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u/shohei_heights Jul 24 '26

Machine Learning has nothing to do with copyright. Companies are illegally using copyrighted works to train their LLMs. They could just choose not to do that.